


fly on

by Al_D_Baran



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam-Centric, Complicated Relationships, Grief/Mourning, Loss, M/M, Not Beta Read, Orphan Keith (Voltron), Post-Kerberos Mission, Wakes & Funerals, and keith’s a poor fucking kiddo, idk what else to tag, i’ll edit this more later i guess but i’m tired of it rn woop, look adam has complicated adult feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28332756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Al_D_Baran/pseuds/Al_D_Baran
Summary: “ How does it feel to have the ground crumble beneath your feet? Adam doesn’t know. He’s old enough, he can pick himself up. It’s not the end of the world.”Adam finds Keith at Shiro’s funeral.
Relationships: Adam & Keith (Voltron), Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Keith & Shiro (Voltron), Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 42





	fly on

**Author's Note:**

> sup! long time no post something new.
> 
> this is an old fic i’ve touched up a little and will touch up more when i’m not at work. i want to say adam is a complicated character in this going through grief differently than keith and his flaws make him great. what a tragic bastard.
> 
> also ahem
> 
> last christmas you gave me your heart and the very next day i fucking shattered it
> 
> thank u

So fly on

Ride through

Maybe one day I'll fly next to you

— “O (Fly on)”, Coldplay

It’s a beautiful day. Sunny, no clouds, the air is warm but comfortable.

A perfect day to lower an empty casket into the ground, Adam thinks with biting irony. Just when he had thought he was done with Shiro, the man had to go and die in space, leaving him as the closest person to care for the funeral expenses. Of course, the Garrison is paying for everything and an officer job comes with a nifty little plot in the army cemetery outside the closest village.

Its expenses of lush grass and tall trees make it a nice change of scenery.

It still feels fake, Adam thinks, staring at Shiro’s charming smile in his portrait. What an asshole, he thinks. He looks like the future of this generation for this promotional parade but Shiro told him he was just thinking of what restaurant he wanted to drop by for take-out later during the day.

Adam turns just in time during the droning priest to see someone under a nearby tree, staring at them, hands in his pockets… He’d have expected curious civilians but this one guy he somehow forgot to think of.

It was purely a mistake. No mail box to send an invitation to. Adam doesn’t like how it was a relief to not _have_ to invite Keith. It would have been the polite thing to do, to ask the little kid that Shiro kept glued to his side to come to the funerals, a nice way to close the wounds he’s left on them when he exploded with his ship. Shiro always knew he’d hurt them all when he’d die, that he was living on a clock that kept ticking and ticking.

He forgot that he was the only one deeply used to the idea of his own mortality.

It’s obvious Keith is there for the event. How he had wind of it, Adam doesn’t know and doesn’t quite care to learn how. He’s dressed casually, a black long-sleeved shirt and some tight jeans, black too, with holes in them. He’d look out of place in a crowd of suits and ties. Maybe he doesn’t own anything that would fit today.

The poor kid looks downright miserable. Adam feels a pinch of agony at how he just feels nothing. He doesn’t care, even when he should, even when he knows he should. It would be the polite thing to do, to offer Keith a shoulder. He too – he lost Shiro, too.

How does it feel to have the ground crumble beneath your feet? Adam doesn’t know. He’s old enough, he can pick himself up. It’s not the end of the world.

People die every day. It’s not a special day. None of them is special. And there’s Keith. Looking like the world stopped its grand spinning because Shiro blew himself up in space before his rendez-vous with death, just like he wanted to.

“Hey,” Adam says, approaching Keith under the willow’s shade.

Keith looks up to him, staring as if he knows very much that Adam also does not care at all about him. Not as if – he does, he knows. Adam was always terrible at hiding his dislike of Keith, seeing in him only what everybody else saw in him. Some juvie punk he didn’t understand _why_ Shiro wasted his time on, even with his obvious talent. Keith latched to Shiro like a starved kitten to a foster mother, small and thin, following him yet trying to push him away.

Keith stole the most mundane things off Shiro, like a kleptomaniac, as if to push him away him and yet, give him a reason to come back.

“Hi,” Keith says, arms crossed, guarded, keeping a safe distance of a few feet between them. “What do you want?” Harsh. Adam can’t say it’s not exactly what he expected.

“How are you holding up?” he asks, pointedly avoiding how Keith isn’t invited to the event and some people have already turned around to look at what they’re doing. Must be a funny scene to those who know Keith was a subject of dissent that Shiro would not let go off. Adam still doesn’t get _why_.

Keith looks brittle then. Any question, any word is a hammer strong enough to shatter him. Adam notices how he attempts to look tough, squaring the shoulders even when his eyes are misty.

“Fine,” Keith croaks. “I’m fine. And you?”

“I’ve seen better days.” It’s true. He can’t help his mind wandering in places it shouldn’t be. Scenarios of things he could have done, refuses to say he should have done. It happened this way. There’s nothing he can do about it now. “But I’m good. Thank you for asking.”

There’s a silence. Keith looks away.

They truly have nothing to say to each other. Adam knows he’s been nasty to a kid, all this time. If he were a better man, he’d regret it. There’s a dark feeling of vindication, that he still has Shiro, in some grotesque way, after everything and Keith… well, Keith has nothing. The ever-present jealousy he always hated is still there, prideful with possession.

Adam feels a little dizzy. He’s got nothing either. Nothing but a dead man, a could-have-been marriage. They’re both miserable. Shiro’s memory burns his tongue, moistens his eyes. But Adam isn’t going to cry. There’s just no way. Fuck Shiro, he thinks again, like he’s thought so many times, so many more times ever since the ship became dust. That idiot got what he wanted, right? Well, fuck him.

To hold grudge against the dead… well, Shiro will have made him pathetic in a truly wide array of ways. Pathetically jealous, he thinks first, summoning a memory of Shiro shouting at him.

“What the fuck do you have against him?” he said, one night, furious like he rarely was after Adam mentioned Keith would likely go back to juvie.

“He’s just a little bum and only you refuse to see this,” he’d said, venom and nastiness dripping off the word. He’s never been the jealous type and being jealous of a kid who Shiro clearly didn’t see any romantic interest in. Shiro just made more and more time for his little protégé than he did for him, more and more. More and more for Kerberos. Soon enough, it only felt like there just wasn’t enough space for him in Shiro’s tight schedule.

“Shiro, he,” Adam starts, unable to stop himself. “He really loved you. A lot. Always talked about you. You were… you were like the little brother he never had.” Always wanted. Shiro told him the sad story of his father, who, after his mother died, only saw his first wife in his son. To deal with the pain he left him with his grandfather, Akira, and took up a new spouse. No wonder Keith and Shiro got along so well. Their stories were similar. Shiro knew all Keith needed was someone.

He should be there for Keith, Adam knows when he keep talking, “He really believed in you. He always did. Anytime I… anyone said nasty things, he jumped to your defence.” Keith could be a good kid too, he knows. Shiro turned out good and they have almost the same story, they’ve lived through the same ordeals. So why can he see that overcoming story in Shiro, and in Keith, all he can see is a failure and a bum?

Keith lets out a shaky breath. Adam turns to him, notices his trembling lip. “Why are you telling me that? Why are you even talking to me? You fucking hate me.” As if it dawns on him once again that he’s alone, Keith lets out a sob, wiping his eyes. “Nobody fucking thought of me at all beside Shiro. Nobody even… nobody tried to find me when I left. You guys all fucking suck.” He sniffles loudly, crumbling and turning to hide as he tries to keep himself from crying even as some drop down his cheeks.

They’re still a little chubby, somehow. Keith is just a kid.

And Adam stands there, awkward. He thinks of what Shiro would have wanted. That someone would be there for Keith, that someone would give him the support he needs. And Adam always knew he couldn’t do that. Not without bitterness, cause even in death, Shiro asked more of him then he would give back.

Even though now Shiro had nothing more to give him than heartache.

It’s the right thing to do, Adam tells himself as he brings Keith to his chest. The boy just barely struggles, tensing in the hold before he returns it, squeezing him with surprising force. It’s just what he needed, someone to be there. He’s taller than Shiro and Keith presses his head to his shoulder, just like he would with Shiro. Like a little kid.

“He did, Keith,” Adam says, voice tight from empathy. “Really did. He was so proud of you.”

Keith cries harder, clinging to his shirt as if he’ll lose himself in his own storm. “I loved him,” he says, muffled by his vest. “I love him so much.”

Adam feels his jealousy rise again.

At least that’s one of them who still does. Adam doesn’t even know if what he feels for Shiro can be called “love” anymore. At least one of them has genuine feelings, at least one of them can feel affection, without the tares of adulthood rotting it into resentment.

Adam listens to Keith cry, holds onto him like he holds his old grudge when he wishes he could let go. The idea someone loved Shiro like that, loved him like he held the ground he walked on, should hurt him. It should hurt. But he’s not bitter. He doesn’t feel anything anymore. If he knocked on the wooden box that should hold his emotions, Adam wonders if it’d sound as empty as that casket out there.

The casket they’re covering in dirt now. Keith doesn’t see, smearing snot on his suit and clinging to him, as if to hold on to the last thing that keeps him tied to his world, the world that’s being buried under the ground. The grave that opened beneath the poor kid, knocking him right off these unsteady fledgling feet.

Fucking Shiro. Giving a ledge to a little bird to leap off from, then shattering it.

It was empty wood, he thinks, like this heart-shaped box of his. Like that man-shaped casket, empty yet filling a hole so big, Adam nearly feels swallowed by it each time he looks at it.

Keith still cries. Like he’s kept so much in, like he’s so full he only needed this to burst. Adam holds him. Like he should. Maybe because he can’t let go either, because that empty hole out there, that empty box might swallow Keith too, those shovels of earth might take everything out of him too. Maybe Keith’s own grief could fill his own empty a little, he wonders.

Adam wishes he could cry with him. That he wouldn’t be so numb, so empty to it all. It feels like he’s got nothing left to give than the space between his arm to a poor orphan, orphaned of parents, friends, future, the one man who saw everything nobody and not even Keith himself could.

Adam wishes he could be like Shiro then, to have the right words to turn Keith’s shipwreck around. He’s not like him, he doesn’t have to words. His mouth is empty as he stares at the ceremony, wishing he could summon the parts of Shiro he should still have carbed in him, to make words that would give Keith a rope, a ledge to hold onto.

When Keith stops crying, the grave is already covered, flowers have already been placed upon it in heaps of commemorations. Some of them at least still have something to give. Keith wipes his eyed, face puffy, eyes and nose red. He sniffles.

Adam looks into his eyes, realises the outpour was it. It left him as empty as Adam feels, once again, wishing everything Shiro had given to him wasn’t gone and turned to anger, resent for leaving so stupidly. Dying so vainly, taking so much out of all of them. He wish he were like Shiro, able to give more than would come back.

Adam’s voice catches in his throat as all he finds to say is, “I’m sorry.”

Keith stares at the ground, swallowing again as he stares ahead, to the fresh hole that took everything from him.

“Yeah. Me too.”

Adam does feel it. Regret. For having been so cold to the poor kid. To have been so terrified by Shiro’s ticking, ever-passing good days that he’d let misplaced jealousy make him like this. Maybe the story of overcoming the odds Shiro saw in Keith could still be seen now, if only he’d been less possessive of those good years he yearned for with his would-be-husband.

They’re both miserable, he knows, watching Keith leave on what’s left of ground under him.

It’s a bitter thought, but Adam remembers it. Shiro had always been deeply used to the idea of his own mortality. And maybe he knew. Maybe he kept trying to do more, trying to give, trying to fill the world around him with exploits because he wanted that box not to ring hollow when earth would hit it once this was all over.

Shiro had so much to give. So little time to spare.

If only everything he’s given didn’t come to dust once he became dust too, Adam thinks with a chuckle that became hollow too.

Even in death, Shiro’s taken more than he had to give, Adam thinks as he watches Keith walk away, disappearing behind the horizon. He walks back to the ceremony, knowing the ground is steady beneath his feet. He’s old enough. He can pick himself up.

It’s not the ground that makes those words sound so hollow for him.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos is you care, comment if you dare.
> 
> there’s some animal crackers and juice boxes to appease your heartache in the comment box


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